Sep. 30, 2013
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Even though she's sleeping, that doesn't stop the princess from dancing with ethereal lightness and willowy grace in a dream sequence in a birch forest during Matthew Bourne's reimagining of 'Sleeping Beauty.' / Photos Special to the Register

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You have to see Matthew Bourne’s luxurious new ballet with your own eyes to understand just how beautifully someone can drift off to dreamland. It’s Bed, Bath & way Beyond the typical nightly routine.

So you could guess “Sleeping Beauty” was a fairy tale just by its title. Even so, you’d have to see Matthew Bourne’s luxurious new ballet with your own eyes to understand just how beautifully someone can drift off to dreamland. It’s Bed, Bath & way Beyond the typical nightly routine.

It’s even a cut above the routine for Des Moines Performing Arts, which proudly hosted the production’s North American premiere. The British company spent a week rehearsing at the Civic Center and the Ballet Des Moines studio before performing three times this weekend and then flitting off to the nine other cities on the national tour. It’s too bad they couldn’t stay longer.

The new adaptation opens in 1890, the year Tchaikovsky polished off the original score, in a palace as spectacular as Versailles (designed by Lez Brotherston). Enormous gilt pillars bookend the royal nursery where royal servants scramble to keep up with her tiny royal highness, Princess Aurora (a doll animated by a pair of black-clad puppeteers).

Her parents (played on Friday by Edwin Ray and Daisy May Kemp) were blessed with their new baby only after making a shady deal with a fairy named Carabosse (Adam Maskell) who decides later that the king and queen aren’t sufficiently grateful. So trouble ensues, first with a moonlit visit from a gaggle of fairies and then much later, when Aurora turns 21.

Bourne is famous for beefing up ballet for a broader audience, and he succeeds here by balancing the knock-out visuals with the quirky, individualized characters. He gives all of the fairies their own moves, for example, even as they fly in together on a conveyor belt, in raccoon-eye makeup and a flurry of tiny wings.

The story is unavoidably lopsided since the title character dozes off before intermission, which lasts 100 years, and keeps sleeping through most of the second act. But that doesn’t stop her from dancing.

On Friday, the young star Hannah Vassallo gave Aurora vital energy at her birthday party on the palace lawn, ethereal lightness during her dream in a birch forest, and willowy grace whenever anyone lifted her or flung her around — which happened a lot.

Her boyish sweetheart, played by Dominic North, is stronger than he looks, first shy as a royal servant, then resolute a century later as a vampire in a gray Nike sweatshirt. (It’s complicated.)

The show would have been better with a live orchestra, but the recording is an excusable trade-off. It’s expensive to tour with all the musicians required for Tchaikovsky’s elaborate score. So in this show, at least, the visuals win out. And they win big.

This is the third Bourne show in which Des Moines Performing Arts has invested financial support, after the ballet “Edward Scissorhands” and “The Car Man,” the story of a mechanic set to the music of “Carmen.” Let’s hope the others come here soon.